“History demonstrates the power of stories. Humans tell stories about themselves, trying to explain how we got here in the present, and to chart a course into the futures we imagine. Stories we tell about the past have the power to include and exclude, shape how we treat our environment, and can even spur people toward inspiring actions. Thus, to me, history done well is storytelling about truth, and that can be a powerful thing. My scholarship is about how people in the past told stories that continue to shape our present day.”
Dr. Stephen Hausmann earned his B.A. and M.A. From the University of Vermont and his Ph.D. from Temple University. His areas of expertise include American history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, environmental history, Native American history, and the history of the American West. His first book, under contract with the University of Nebraska Press, is tentatively titled Indian Country: An Environmental History of the Black Hills. This project examines the intersection between human culture and non-human environment in the American West through the histories of places like Mount Rushmore and events like the 1972 Rapid City Flood. His research on the Black Hills has been funded by the Newberry Library, the Linda Hall Library, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, among other institutions.
While he is completing this project, Dr. Hausmann is also getting underway on two new research projects: one on the history of medicine, colonialism, and Indigenous North America, and another about the long environmental history of the Land Back movement. He has previously served as assistant director for the American Society for Environmental History, and currently serves as that organization's acting executive director. For the 2024-2025 academic year, Dr. Hausmann is a Mellon Fellow with the National Park Service, doing historical work at Mount Rushmore National Monument in South Dakota. When not teaching, reading, or writing history, he can be found rooting for his oft-beleaguered Boston Red Sox, playing any and all history-based video games, and spending as much time outside as possible.
Beginning in fall 2025, Dr. Hausmann will join the Appalachian State University history department as an assistant professor of American environmental history.
Education
Ph.D. Temple University
Areas of Study
United States History, Environmental History, Native American History, History of the American West
Selected Courses
HIS 3237 Nature, Wilderness, and American Life
HIS 3238 America’s National Parks
Selected Publications
“Marketing Eternity: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change at Twentieth-Century Mount Rushmore” in Raw Capital: Building Ecosystems/Selling Natures (Hagley Perspectives in Business and Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming, 2025)
“Erasing Indian Country: Urban Native Space and the 1972 Rapid City Flood,” Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 52, no. 3, Autumn 2021
- Winner, 2022 Arrell M. Gibson Award for best article in Native American history, Western History Association
“’We Must Perform Experiments on Some Living Body’: Antivivisection and American Medicine, 1850-1915,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 16, no. 3, July 2017
